“Now don’t run,” the man advised her, getting his breathing under control. “Don’t do anything now but what I say. Just walk back up the path. That way you stay alive.”
Surely, thought Margie, before she had climbed as far as the castle again, she could somehow manage to wake up. No nightmare went on indefinitely. And at the same time she knew better. Across the river, its sound carrying freely over the broad water, a diesel semi was taking the narrow highway at high speed. Its headlights might as well have been shining somewhere on Mars.
“Get moving.”
Slowly, wordlessly, Margie turned and started up the path. At least her ankle wasn’t really twisted. But she kept to a slow limp.
The man, climbing only a pace behind her, spoke in a low voice almost in her ear. “Tell me, how many of you were in that tunnel altogether? Who else is there?” And another few steps behind them both, the beast paced slowly. From its throat now came a straining growl, as if only with the greatest effort could it keep itself from seizing Margie in its jaws.
Margie would have been quite willing to answer the man’s question, if she could have understood it. To ask how many were in the tunnel seemed to mean—
This time the four-footed run approaching down the path was almost silent; for all its size the pale bulk that hurtled leaping in the night was almost on top of Margie, before she was aware of it. She made a small sound and tried to throw herself aside. A furred shape as heavy as that of the first beast brushed her in its passage, knocking her aside. This time Margie fell softly. On the slope below there sounded impact, as if a rolling boulder had collided with a tree. Margie slid into tangling bushes on the steep slope. Nearby was thrashing confusion, savage noise as of great beasts in combat. When Margie freed herself from the bushes she slipped and again rolled over on the slope. Her mind spun dizzily.
Half stunned, she raised her head. The black man was nowhere to be seen. The beast that had threatened her, the dark-furred one, was down on the ground while the pale newcomer crouched over it, attacking, driving for the throat. The position held for only a moment. Then the dark beast with a great yowl of agony fought to its feet. Another cry, and it had torn free of its attacker and burst into flight. It hurtled past Margie, ignoring her, its eyes glaring redly. Its next howl, receding, seemed to reach her ears from a long distance away.
The merciless clarity of a lightning flash showed Margie the second beast turning her way. Its own glowing eyes were now fixed on her, and dark stains were already matting dry on its pale fur.
Margie rolled away. With horrible ineffective slowness she got herself up on all fours. She knew even as she moved that before she could even begin to run again the great pale beast was going to land on her back…
Lightning flashed again.
“Wait,” said a man’s voice, close behind Margie, just as she crouched to run. It was a deep, compelling voice, one that she had not heard before.
Poised for hopeless flight, she turned her head. The pale-furred animal had vanished. Where it had been, a tall, lean man now stood, dressed in black trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. His eyes did not glow, but they were fixed on Margie just as the eyes of the pale wolf had been. The man appeared to be bleeding heavily from his left shoulder, up near his throat, but still he stood erect.
Margie whimpered.
“Softly,” the deep voice commanded. “Calm yourself; for the moment you are safe. Tell me who you are. My name is Talisman.”
NINE
Thunder was grumbling in the distance as Simon walked out through the French doors into the courtyard that held the pool. This was a stone-paved expanse, containing an island or two of tended grass and nascent flowerbeds, and surrounded on three sides by the sprawling bulk of the castle. On the fourth side there was more lawn, then a tennis court, and beyond that a tall, thick hedge. Through the hedge a driveway came curving into the grounds, from a public road that could not be seen from here. And through it, also, an even more private and unmarked path led down to riverbank and grotto.
With the flow of clouds above, sunlight came and went across the water of the pool, which was near the doors through which Simon had emerged into the courtyard. From its irregular shape it was clear that the original plan had been to suggest a moat. The last time that Simon could remember standing on this spot, fifteen years ago, the pool had been drained and dry, the bottom littered with dust and dead leaves, the dry sides marked with broken and discolored tiles. The stone gargoyles round the rim, that now pumped circulating water into the blue depths from their stone throats had then been gaping, dry-throated monsters, eerily discolored too. But recently the pool, like almost everything else about the castle, had been almost perfectly refurbished. A dozen deck chairs had been arranged round it in the shade of modern patio umbrellas. At a white painted table of wrought iron on the far side of the pool there sat a gray, elderly couple wearing conservative swim suits and dark glasses. They looked rather, Simon thought, like uncertain guests at some posh hotel.
The dark glasses made it impossible to tell whether the couple had taken notice of him or not. He decided to delay approaching them until after his first good plunge; on a day like this cold water might be a tonic to clear the mind. The diving board was new and resilient. Simon’s first dive took him deep, and he prolonged it into an underwater swim across almost the full diagonal of the pool.
As he came up, shaking water from his long hair, his eye fell on a small group of young workers, dressed in antique garb like Gregory’s, who were unloading something from a van parked at the edge of the drive. Among them Simon could recognize the teenaged girl from the antique shop. His dream came back to him, but distantly, without impact. She and her brother were probably distant relatives of some kind, his own as well as his hosts’, Collines or Littlewoods or Picards; people living in or near Frenchman’s Bend were more likely than not to be some kind of kin to each other. The two kids might well be talking about their boating customers of the day. Well, it was too late to worry about that now. And Simon had bigger things to worry about, like being unable to remember the return boat trip at all.
Right now he had to think about being a guest, which was evidently one of the things for which he was being paid. He pulled himself up out of the water, retrieved his towel, and approached the gray-haired couple in their poolside chairs, meanwhile determinedly sticking out his hand. “Hello, I’m Simon Hill.”
The man jumped up at once, obviously glad to have the ice broken. “My name’s Jim Wallis—spelled with an eye-ess on the end. And this’s Emily.”
Emily, somehow conveying an impression of bright friendly eyes without removing her glasses, lifted herself halfway out of her chair to shake Simon’s hand. “Pleased to meet another guest. I bet you’re the fella who’s going to do the tricks tonight.”
“That’s me.”
And, having said that, Simon forgot that he was supposed to be having a conversation. Even Margie in her hidden passageway was for the moment forgotten, as was the act.
A female figure in a bikini had just appeared, framed in the French doors on the far side of the pool. It was Vivian, and she was still only fifteen years old.
For half a breath the illusion was utterly convincing. Vivian was no imaginative vision, but solid reality, and looked not a bit older than she had fifteen years ago. And then she moved, stepping to one side of the doors to speak quietly for a moment with one of the servants. When she moved, changes in her were immediately apparent, in her expression and manner if nothing else, and Simon could see that she was after all a very youthful thirty. In the same moment it passed through his mind, on some level devoted to irrelevancies, that her bikini today was yellow, not green as it had been on that day when he saw her last.